Thought

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I've been thinking...

You know what really bothers me about being a programmer? The root reason of why I don't like coming to work? Sure, over the years there's many reasons; Windows is a pain, there's uninformed management, there's poor business choices, there's aggressive politics, there's the guy behind me talking to himself (well, that one doesn't really fit into what I'm about to say), there's all sorts of crap.

But it all boils down to one thing - it's pretentious.

This must be what it's like being in a successful pop band. Who cares about the curly brace being on what line! Who cares if I instantiate an object and pass it a message, or if I encapsulate the data directly in a helper class! IT DOESN'T MATTER. Why do I have to spend any time at all explaining why I thought using OpenMQ though JMS in an EJB in an SA was a better solution than accessing the NMB with a custom SE?

I think this is also why people get so crushed if their company goes under, for example Meriam's stories about the Sequent employee reactions to IBM. It's like people's lives are revolving around how company-logo golf shirts there are, like that's a measure of success...

Look at this place! Crapy furniture, breaking after a year, white office, metal framed walls, institutional carpet... This is worthless! Who do we think we are?

But lookit how cool the screen saver is on my all black PC!

It's always some sort of principle! That's why people insist on MSFT solutions, even when they don't work. That's why people build some giant expert system when the user needs trivial order-entry. That's why they are huge ETL package just to get data into a table.

In our wildest, most optimistic dreams, lines of code I type today will be erased within 5 years. Who do programmers think they are? We're building things no one will care about beyond its GUI, and then not for very long. If we're lucky, very lucky

This isn't rocket science. This isn't great history. We're not designing bridges, mush less Eiffel Towers, much, much less great pyramids.

POJO or stateful EJB? Grunge or "big hair"? Blah...